eccuity Podcasts

Dr. Shalini Divya is the CEO and founder of TasmanIon, a Wellington deep-tech company building rechargeable aluminium-ion batteries that are cheap and can't catch fire. A Tesla Powerwall costs $9,000 to $12,000; she's building the same storage for around $4,500, aimed at households who could never afford one. Having grown up in energy poverty, her mission is personal. And she's refreshingly clear on the endgame: she doesn't want to be the next Tesla, she wants Tesla to buy her company.

Craig McAlpine is the founder of MyCareerBrand, a career coaching and outplacement business in around ten countries, and Pitch, a startup rethinking how people sell themselves into a job. His big idea: a job ad is really a request for proposal, so you should apply like a company bidding for a contract. A business will spend a week bidding for $100k of work, yet job seekers chasing a role worth far more put in a day. A conversation on treating your career like the business it really is.

Jam Mayer founded AI automation consultancy Conversologie and Divergity, a learning platform built for neurodivergent minds. Neurodivergent herself, with ADHD and dyscalculia, she makes the case that so many founders are neurodivergent not because they chose entrepreneurship, but because the nine-to-five was never built for how their brains work. She shares her idea of a personal operating system: designing work around how you actually think, and why that difference is often an advantage.

Tim Doyle is the founder of Doyle Accountants and one of New Zealand's leading crypto tax specialists, with over 2,500 crypto tax returns filed and a client base each holding more than a million dollars in crypto. He got in chasing the upside, made money, lost it all, then built a business from the chaos. His honest take: almost nobody gets rich trading crypto, and his wealthiest clients simply bought and never sold. A conversation on tax, crypto, and where wealth is really moving.

Fernanda Da Silva Tatley founded natural skincare company Azurlis, and calls herself an artist in her heart, a scientist by training, and a Reiki master in her soul. A PhD microbiologist who helped a university win tens of millions in research funding, she once turned down investment she badly needed because the terms clashed with her values. After fifteen years bootstrapping, she's honest it hasn't transformed the way she hoped, but she has. A conversation on staying true to yourself.

Matthew Cutts spent nearly thirty years in leading roles in London's biggest West End musicals, from Cats to Jersey Boys. Then he moved home to New Zealand, where his CV meant nothing and nobody knew his name, so he went back to school for the first qualification of his life. Now he helps businesses say what needs to be said. He shares why the best storyteller is really the best listener, why telling a story is only half the job, and why being the best won't get you ahead.

Sarah Laurie is the founder of Take a Breath, whose breathing software has been tested inside Microsoft, Spark, and The Warehouse Group. Her claim reframes everything: breathing isn't relaxation, it's performance. Breathe shallow, the way over 90% of us now do, and the part of your brain that handles focus and decisions switches off. You're not less capable, your brain is in the wrong mode. She's measured 96% of people cutting anxiety and 76% sleeping better, all without stopping work.

John Ballinger is a tech entrepreneur who built the first iPhone heart monitor app, once featured in an Apple ad. But this episode is about how he invests, and it breaks every rule. He holds 99% of his portfolio in a single stock, Rocket Lab, riding an extraordinary founder through every brutal dip. He explains why concentration can beat diversification, why his data shows stocks crushing property over seventy years, and why he thinks most big companies are the Titanic in the age of AI.

Natasa Rasic is the co-founder of ProBizBalance, a bookkeeping and business support company she runs with her own daughter. After twenty years running an accounting firm in Serbia, she sold it to her own staff so they'd keep their stability, then moved to New Zealand with two suitcases to give her daughter a future. Now they're building together. When asked what wealth means, her answer isn't money. It's peace: the freedom to not worry about rent, and time with the people she loves.

Sarah Clearwater is the founder and CEO of RE{FRAMR}, a customer experience consultancy, and built New Zealand's largest community of CX professionals. In a typical B2B sale, up to ten people say yes before a contract is signed, and Sarah finds where that journey quietly breaks, arguing most deals die after the customer has already said yes. A blunt social scientist from Berlin, she explains why most businesses are flying blind, and why chasing a trendy new audience can wreck the one you have.

Leonard Hope is a US patent attorney and computer engineer who has spent nearly three decades protecting the ideas of Microsoft, Amazon, and Nintendo, and now builds his own AI tools for legal work. Yet he refuses to let AI do his thinking, and explains why offloading your brain is a slippery slope that quietly costs you. He built and sold a patent firm, and to reach New Zealand he sold his house, packed his life into a container, and waited out a closed border for nearly five years.

Jeffrey To is the founder of MĀKI, a New Zealand company building autonomous boats and underwater robots that go where humans can't. Bored in lockdown, he turned a cheap fishing kit into a self-driving boat, scanned his local lake, and found a mysterious 55-metre structure nobody could explain, accidentally launching a business now hired by councils and power companies. A PhD engineer from Hong Kong, he once saved 60% of his income before tax, eating on the floor to build the future he wanted.

Harrison Stott founded The Kitchen Collective, New Zealand's first cloud kitchen, with sites in Auckland and Christchurch. If you've ordered delivery lately, it may have come from a kitchen with no storefront and no sign on the door. A serial entrepreneur who cut his teeth across UK startups, including a cloud kitchen that raised a quarter of a billion pounds, he brought the model home, only to find the market didn't exist here yet. An honest look at building, pivoting, and going it alone.

Dec Penfold is a chef and food consultant who has built restaurant brands from Dubai to Melbourne, and once pitched a now-thriving chicken brand to a room of famous YouTubers using a shoebox with stickers on it. He's cooked since he was 14, ran a French kitchen at 22 without speaking the language, and was headhunted by Deliveroo to build "virtual brands." He reveals the fake restaurants hiding inside real kitchens, why he brought Mr Beast Burger to NZ, and how to find revenue others miss.

Andy Wright runs Engage Media, a one-man content agency making social videos for brands from Volkswagen to the local pharmacy. A former radio presenter and pro golfer who now fronts golf for Sky, he's obsessed with one question: what makes people stop scrolling? After years making content nobody watched, he cracked the single principle most people get wrong. He reveals why rough beats polished, how a small-town pharmacy video hit half a million views, and the real cost of playing it safe.

Kai Malte Röver is a German-born industrial designer with 20+ years building products across the world, from six-axis robots for Toyota to the next-generation medical scanner that just earned his Christchurch company FDA clearance. After a culture shock in Japan forced him to learn the language and rethink everything, he saw how differently people see the world. He explains why getting out of your bubble is the key to staying relevant, and why simplicity is the hardest thing to design.

Christine Liggins is co-founder and CEO of the DebtFix Foundation, a charity helping 8,000 New Zealand families a year escape debt. Two decades on the front line have shown her who's really drowning, and it isn't who you'd expect: her average client earns good money yet owes around $80,000 on cards and loans. She reveals why she calls bankruptcy a weapon of mass destruction, why money now drives our mental health crisis, and the one move almost nobody makes when the repayments start to slip.

Kristina Mydlar, founder of Mydlar Consulting, a boutique London firm that helps fintech and financial services companies put AI to work where it actually makes a difference. Kristina spent over 20 years in banking and finance before everything changed in a single evening. During COVID, she found out from a Financial Times article on a Monday night that the company she worked for was being shut down. A few days later a stranger messaged her on LinkedIn asking for help, she remembered a line from Richard Branson about saying yes when opportunity knocks, and a business was born. Her partners have since raised over a billion pounds in equity for their clients.

Paul Tranter, a serial entrepreneur from Birmingham whose life has taken more turns than almost anyone we've had on the show.

Peter Bird, a registered nurse who spent 25 years in occupational health before a health scare made him look closely at what he, and everyone around him, was actually eating. Peter built Kaiwise. You scan a barcode and a simple traffic light system tells you the truth about what you're holding, the level of processing, the additives, the things the label would rather you didn't notice. No advertising, no brand deals, no judgement.